Oct 27, 2017

Millions
of Us (1935) is an early example of American
labor-left filmmaking that experiments with enacted forms, anticipating
Frontier Films’s renowned People of the Cumberland (1938) and Native Land (1942).
Produced surreptitiously in Hollywood in 1934-5, the film dramatizes the plight
of millions of unemployed workers amidst the Depression. This message is
filtered through the story of a single “forgotten man” who walks the streets in
desperate search of a job. Driven by hunger, he contemplates becoming a scab. A
union man intervenes, coaching him to recognize common interests with his
brethren. He is ultimately converted to the cause of trade unionism.

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Millions of Us: Visualizing the protagonist’s conversion to labor unionism and the power
of mass action.

This
ostensibly straightforward narrative belies the film’s melding of modernist
visual style and social realist reportage. Co-director Jack Smith is a
pseudonym for Slavko Vorkapich, a Serbian émigré who arrived in
Hollywood in the early 1920s and distinguished himself as a master of montage.
Working for multiple studios, he created striking, frenetic montage sequences
for a number of silent and sound films, including Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe.
(Several of his silent and pre-code montage works and experimental shorts
are featured on the Unseen Cinema DVD collection). Vorkapich went on to
chair the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

Like
many in Hollywood at the time, Vorkapich was aligned with the Left. He served,
for example, on the National Advisory Board of the Film and Photo League, a
loose collective of radical filmmakers in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, San
Francisco, and several other urban centers committed to documenting the era’s
labor unrest. In this context, a film like Millions of Us is an obvious extension of these activities. Yet, Vorkapich’s earlier experimental work suggests that his sympathy for
the downtrodden predated the mass breadlines of the early Depression. In 1928,
he co-directed The Life and Death of 9431: A Hollywood Extra, an
experimental short with Robert Florey (best remembered for directing Marx
Brothers film The Cocoanuts and studio B-films such as Murders in the
Rue Morgue). The Life and Death of 9431 shows the rapid demise of a
Hollywood hopeful in a heavily Expressionist style. Arriving at the
Studios, the wide-eyed extra enters the casting system, the number 9413 stamped
on his forehead. He soon begins his hopeless job hunt amidst an inhospitable
landscape of “no casting today” signs. Dreams dashed, his humanity is only
restored in death. In its dour story and disorienting visual design, The Life and Death
of 9431 presents a California nightmare.

The Life and Death of 9431: The Hollywood hopeful is just a number.

The
California in Millions of Us is also a nightmare of unemployment signs.
The film opens in an alleyway on a woman in rags before cutting to newspaper
headlines of mass unemployment. The camera then moves to the unnamed man
sleeping outside on a brick ledge with a newspaper as his pillow. He is our
protagonist. As he sleeps, he dreams of food—a roast, an egg on a frying pan,
coffee, and loaves of bread are all superimposed over his face. His dream
continues as he sits at a table ready to eat but, in a terrifying turn, his
plate slides across the table to the waiting hands of a man in fancy dress. Of
this opening sequence, Charles Wolfe observes that the “impressionistic montage
establishes a transient’s hallucinatory state of mind.” In creating this
opening scene, Vorkapich’s singular touch is particularly evident.

Millions of Us: Dreams of Food

The man awakens and proceeds to drag himself
through the gritty urban streets in a quest for work. “No help needed” signs
pepper his journey. As he walks, he encounters another homeless vagrant sitting
in the sidewalk, social realist imagery that anticipates the downtrodden men
depicted in Lionel Rogosin’s On The Bowery (1956). Our protagonist
stares longingly into the window of diner. A kindly old woman from a Catholic
mission eventually offers him assistance. But he arrives only to discover the
shelter is closed for the night. Yet another institution unable to help in his
time of need.

Millions of Us: California's gritty streets and empty promises

The
next segment begins as our threadbare protagonist stumbles upon a group of men
sitting idly in a park. Up until this point, about five and half minutes into
the film, the only sound has come by way of an orchestral score. But here, for
the first time, words are spoken—though not by our protagonist, nor the
scores of forgotten men around him in the park. Instead, it is a radio
broadcast of a speech delivered by a capitalist, whose stentorian voice
espouses platitudes of American rugged individualism that are entirely at odds
with the reality of the millions of unemployed:

“America has been called the land of opportunity and justly so. Where else
in the world does the great opportunity for honest work exist in such a
boundless degree as in America?...Yes, my friends I say to you that a real
willingness to work has never gone unrewarded (that is for long)…Fellow
citizens the period of Depression is a thing of the past….The opportunity is
here my friend. For those who have the courage to reach out and grab it. To
seize it in their hands and drain from it the fine, full measure of sturdy
American effort.”

These lines, of course, ring hollow to the men
sitting in the park, and again, merely affirm the establishment’s lack of
sympathy for America’s unemployed. The film’s political stance in unmistakable.

Dejected
further, our protagonist leaves the park. He soon finds himself
standing idly outside a grocery store watching as bags are loaded into the car
ofwealthy shopper. A single apple falls
out of a bag and roles to his feet. He considers taking it until he
meets the glare of a uniformed police officer. The film fades to black.

Finally,
the protagonist stumbles upon a “help wanted” sign—but picketers surround the
hiring office. He pauses and contemplates. Will he become a much-maligned scab?
Luckily, before he crosses over to the dark side, the union intervenes,
welcoming him to their camp and offering him a meal. Now, finally part of a community,
labor is given a voice, literalized as synchronized dialogue begins. The union
leader stakes his plea for broader working class solidarity and its desire for basic human rights. “You and me,” he says:

“Millions of us who want three square and a job.
Who want a chance to work so we can send our kids to school, so we can have a
roof over our head. Millions of us getting together. That’s the answer! We want
man-sized chunk of everything our hands of made. And just think buddy: that’s
the whole cock-eyed country…Every rivet and bolt and brick rivet. You betcha!
Your hands worked and scrapped. Who gets the gravy? Not you or me.”

The union man’s rationale converts the
protagonist to the cause. He picks up a sign and joins the fight. Of the
sequence, Charles Wolfe writes: “The final segment, the unemployed worker joins
a union and his envisioned fantasies are replaced by lip-synchronized dialogue
and his possession of a new collective, public voice.” This new collective is
visualized in the film’s final image (featured above), footage of marching union men
superimposed on a close-up of the protagonist’s face. This closing image
encapsulates the power and solidarity of the working class mass.

Millions of Us: The protagonist finds solace with his working class brethren.

Upon
completion, the film entered the nontheatrical labor screening circuit and the very act of showing the film became a deeply politicized, incendiary act. In Ohio, a
planned CIO screening was blocked by state censors, as was an intended
screening at an art house in Pittsburgh. These episodes prompted the film's distributor Garrison Films to contact Morris Ernst Leopold, a founder of the American
Civil Liberties Union.

Millions
of Us is an intriguing early work in the history of American documentary
and labor left filmmaking, and demonstrates the shared solidarity among artists
and organized labor during the Red Decade. Under Vorkapich’s deft
hand, the film demonstrates traces of modernist impulse within the
decade’s iconic social realist aesthetic. Its post-production life reveals the
politicized nature of film distribution. At the very least,
it is certainly a film worth a look for film and history buffs alike.

This guest post was written by Tanya Goldman, a PhD Candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University and IndieCollect’s inaugural Scholar-In-Residence during the 2016-17 academic year, and Spencer Nachman, a sophomore at NYU who interned at IndieCollect during the spring 2017 academic term.